Questions and answers about the Ewellic alphabet

This page provides answers to some questions that might arise about the
Ewellic alphabet. Considering the limited
interest that has been shown so far, it seems presumptuous to refer to
these as “frequently asked” questions.

If you have a question about Ewellic that isn’t answered here,
feel free to write to me and I will answer
it (and probably add it to this list).

What is the Ewellic alphabet?

The Ewellic alphabet is a constructed (or “invented”) script
meant for writing
English
and other human
languages. It’s designed to be easy to write and understand. I
invented it as a high-school student in 1980, and have added some
features to it since then.

How does it work?

Very simply, words are written in Ewellic the way the writer
understands them to be correctly pronounced. Spelling is based on
careful pronunciation—as if the speaker were trying to guard
against being misheard. There is considerable flexibility in spelling,
depending on different people’s ideas of “correct
pronunciation.”

Conventional Latin-script orthography is not taken into account.
If you understand that there is no “g” sound in English
high, and no “e” sound in
Frencheau, you’re most of the way there.

Ewellic is written in horizontal lines, left-to-right, top-to-bottom.

What do the Ewellic letters look like?

RunicCirthEwellic

Letters in Ewellic consist entirely of straight lines—usually one
main vertical stroke (two for vowels), with a few horizontal or diagonal
half-width “tails” or full-width cross-strokes. All letters
are the same height, except that the full-width diagonal strokes can
extend slightly above the cap line or below the baseline. Accent marks
are placed above stressed vowels. There are few basic shapes; most
letters are rotations or reflections of other letters.

The Ewellic letterforms were heavily influenced by the Scandinavian and
Anglo-Saxon
runes, as well
as the Cirth alphabet
invented by J.R.R. Tolkein for The Lord of the Rings, although
none of the Ewellic letters was intentionally assigned to the same sound
as a similar-looking Runic or Cirth letter. The chart at right shows the
visual similarities between these three writing systems.

Are there any sample texts that show what Ewellic text really looks
like?

It should be possible to write at least English, French, German,
Italian,
Spanish,
and
Esperanto
in the Ewellic alphabet. These are the languages with which I have the
most familiarity (although I needed a lot of help with French and
German) that did not pose major problems fitting into the original
model. Languages that rely heavily on tone
(Chinese
and
Vietnamese),
vowel length
(Japanese),
or palatization
(Russian)
are not currently
supported.
Dutch,
Portuguese,
and
Welsh
are almost supported.

Is there an invented language, culture, race of creatures, or storyline
that goes with this alphabet?

No, there is none. Although I respect the
conlang and
fiction-writing communities, they are not relevant to the Ewellic
alphabet. In particular, there is no “Ewellic language.”
Of course, you can always use the Ewellic alphabet to write your
favorite conlang, if the necessary letters exist.

Ewellic is not a language. Write these words in whatever language you
choose, using the Ewellic letters and orthography.

Is this one of those “English spelling reform” projects that
have failed so dismally in the past?

No, Ewellic is just a hobby project (of the type Wikipedia calls
“things
made up one day”) that I happen to have maintained over the
past three decades. I have no desire to promote it as a replacement
for the established Latin-script orthography.

Ewellic is a
phonemic
alphabet, which means roughly that there is one letter per sound.
There is not necessarily a 1-to-1 relationship between Latin-script
letters and Ewellic letters. A word like shoe is spelled with
only two letters: one for the sh sound and one for the oe
sound. (Some words like box and giant require more
letters in Ewellic than in Latin.) There is no single letter directly
corresponding to “C” because in the
supported languages,
“C” does not refer to a single sound the way that, say,
“M” does.

IPA is a
phonetic
transcription system that contains symbols for the distinctive sounds
(phonemes) of every known human language. IPA can be used to
create a broad or narrow transcription of language; the
difference is in the amount of phonological and dialectical detail
reflected in the transcription. IPA is invaluable for serious linguistic
study.

Ewellic is intended as an everyday writing system for a small set of
languages, for use by ordinary speakers of those languages rather than
linguists. It is meant to be used in a very broad sense, without
capturing exact phonetic differences between speakers and dialects.
Ewellic cannot be easily expanded to represent phonemic features or
distinctions far removed from those in the
supported languages,
as IPA can.

I had no knowledge of IPA at the time I created Ewellic. I did have
knowledge of the various English-based
“pronunciation
keys” used in U.S. dictionaries, but Ewellic is not a cipher
for any of those, either. Comparisons between Ewellic and the
Deseret or
Shavian
alphabets are more appropriate, although those writing systems
(unlike Ewellic) were
intended as replacements for the Latin alphabet.

Does Ewellic have uppercase and lowercase letters?

No, there is only one case for all letters. There is also no
“namer dot,” as in Shavian, or other indication that a
letter or word is to be considered special in some way. The name
Jim (a nickname for James) is spelled exactly the same as
the word gym (short for gymnasium).

Most of the world’s writing systems are monocase, with the rather
prominent exception of alphabets derived directly or indirectly from
Greek (including the widespread Latin and Cyrillic alphabets).

How do you indicate stressed (accented) syllables in Ewellic?

Most of the
supported languages
(except French) recognize stress as an aspect of pronunciation. For
multi-syllable words in these languages, an acute accent
´ is written above the vowel of the syllable
with primary stress. This is basically the same meaning that the acute
accent has in Spanish, but it is applied to all words of two or
more syllables—not just those that don’t fit the default
stress rules—and it is never applied to one-syllable words.

Only one accent should be used in a given word, except for long compound
words like undersecretary where each constituent word has its own
stressed and unstressed syllables. A merely long word like
incontrovertibility does not qualify for a second accent.
Unlike the practice in IPA and dictionary keys, there is no mark to show
secondary stress.

When writing French in Ewellic, an accent may optionally be placed on
the stressed syllable of a word or phrase to facilitate correct
pronunciation. The normal practice for French would be to omit all
accents.

For other languages, including English, accents on multi-syllable words
are part of the spelling of the word, and are mandatory. Omitting them
is considered a spelling error, much as writing a proper name like
england with a lowercase e would be considered a spelling
error.

Neither the acute accent nor any other combining diacritical mark is
used in Ewellic for any other purpose, such as to indicate a change in
vowel quality or tone.

So I can’t just leave off the accents? Shavian and Deseret
don’t use them.

Accents are essential to Ewellic, as noted above. If you are using a
script to convert text from another phonetic writing system into
Ewellic, you will need to add the accents manually.

What other punctuation is used with Ewellic?

The preferred primary quotation marks are the double guillemets
« » , and the preferred secondary quotation marks are the
single guillemets ‹ › . For nested quotations, double and
single quotation marks are alternated as in English. Periods (full
stops) and commas that do not belong to a quoted passage are placed
outside
the quotation marks (like the U.K. style, unlike the U.S. style).

All other punctuation marks are essentially the same as in English
written in the Latin script. This includes the period, comma, colon,
semicolon, exclamation point and question mark (optionally preceded by
a space, as in French), and dashes. Hyphens may occur between complete
words (e.g. a full-scale effort), but are generally not used with
prefixes and suffixes such as re- and non- and
-ish. Spanish-style inverted exclamation points and question
marks are not used.

How do you write English contractions such as “can’t”
in Ewellic?

The same way you write other words: as they sound. The contraction
can’t (“cannot”) is spelled the same as the
word cant (“jargon”). The apostrophe within a
contraction is not pronounced (unless you are
Victor Borge),
so it is not written.

How do you indicate liaison in French using Ewellic?

Liaison in French is the practice of pronouncing the (normally
silent) final consonant of a word in certain cases when it is followed
by a word with an initial vowel. Since individual words are spelled in
Ewellic according to their pronunciation, liaison should be reflected
in the spelling: 
(“vu”) for vous, but
  (“vuz et”)
for vous êtes.

Liaison is not the same as enchaînement (linking), the practice
of pronouncing the final consonant of a word as though it belonged to
the next word. Enchaînement moves the boundaries between spoken
words, and is generally not reflected in Ewellic spelling; that
is, vous êtes would not be written as
*  
(“*vu zet”).

How do you distinguish long and short vowels in German using Ewellic?

Most of the distinctions between “long” and
“short” vowels in German are phonetic but not phonemic; the
occurrence of one or the other can be predicted from context and they
do not participate in minimal pairs. In cases like Bann versus
Bahn, the vowel quality is also affected and there are two
separate vowel letters in Ewellic (AE and AA) that can be used to
capture this distinction.

How do you write doubled (geminated) consonants in Italian and other
languages using Ewellic?

Gemination is a feature of Italian and some other languages, in
which a consonant pronounced for a longer period of time is phonemically
different from the “normal” short consonant. It is indicated
in Ewellic by writing the consonant letter, or the first letter of an
affricative pair, twice in succession.

Gemination is a basic phonemic distinction in Italian. For example,
the words camino (“fireplace”) and cammino
(“road”) are distinguished by the length of the
“M” sound. The difference is shown in the Latin-script
orthography, and also in Ewellic, by the contrastive use of single and
double letters.

This feature is less common in English and the other
supported languages, but
does occur in some compound words such as midday and
coattails, as well as words with certain prefixes and suffixes,
such as unknown and meanness. This is not a critical
distinction in English as it is in Italian, but a few pairs of words
like unaimed and unnamed can only be distinguished in
speech by the length of the spoken consonant. In other cases, even if
there is no minimal pair, it would be considered unusual or substandard
to pronounce a word like midday without lengthening the
“D” sound.

Note that gemination also occurs in some English words like
bookcase that are not spelled by doubling a letter in the
Latin-script orthography. Conversely, double letters in the Latin
script do not always indicate gemination. For example, in attic
and apply the consonant sound is not lengthened, and in
accent the two C’s stand for completely different sounds.
The important point is that, as always, Ewellic spelling is determined
by the way a word is pronounced and not by the way it is spelled in the
Latin script.

When do you use the “schwa” vowel in Ewellic?

Not as often as you might think. Unlike the practice in some U.S.
dictionary pronunciation keys, which use the schwa
(ə) liberally to indicate almost any neutral or
weakly stressed vowel (e.g. /ənʹdər/
for under), this letter should be used in Ewellic only for vowel
and semi-vowel sounds that would simply sound wrong if pronounced with a
more definite vowel sound. This includes unstressed a,
an, and the, and the last syllable of little and
forgotten in English, as well as le in French and the last
syllable of bitte and haben in German. The Ewellic schwa
letter should never be used in a stressed syllable (marked with
an acute accent).

When do you use the glottal stop consonant in Ewellic?

The glottal stop is the newest Ewellic letter, added in 2012. Like the
schwa, it is meant to be used sparingly. Use it to write words like
uh-oh which would sound truly bizarre if the vowels were allowed
to glide together without the stop. (There are very few words like this
in English.) Don’t use it routinely for things like
sentence-initial words that begin with a vowel sound (“Apples
are good”), even if a pronouncing dictionary that follows
narrow IPA includes it.

How are acronyms (“NATO”) and initialisms
(“IBM”) handled in Ewellic?

Acronyms are pronounceable words that are made up of the Latin-script
initials of other words. These should be spelled as they are commonly
pronounced (“nay-toe”).

Initialisms are “words” that are pronounced by speaking the
names of their individual Latin-script letters, which are
language-dependent and not necessarily related to the letters that would
be used to write the underlying words in Ewellic. These can be written
by spelling out the Latin letter names (“eye bee em”) as
individual words. The Ewellic letter names given in the
accompanying charts are for
identification purposes only, and should not be taken as pronounceable
names for these letters.

Latin-script letters are sometimes used as symbols for ordering
(“Section A”) or unique indexing (“part number
SR626SW”). How does that work in Ewellic?

There is no provision for this at present. Letters in Ewellic are
intended for writing pronounceable text. Decimal or hexadecimal
digits or Latin-script
letters can be used for indexing.

How are words sorted in Ewellic?

There is currently no established sorting order for the Ewellic
alphabet. In particular, the order of code points in the
CSUR encoding of Ewellic is not
intended as a lexicographic order. This has been
cited
by a spelling-reform advocate as a “significant reason” that
the Ewellic alphabet has “fail[ed] to catch on,” although
Ewellic is not a proposal for
spelling reform.

Is Ewellic difficult to write by hand? Wasn’t it intended just
for computer fonts?

Ewellic was invented in 1980, long before the widespread availability
of computers with interchangeable “soft fonts” that could
display or print arbitrary letterforms. For over 20 years it existed
only in handwritten form, in journals and shopping lists and the
like.

Ewellic was designed to be easy to write by hand, not dependent on
computer rendering techniques, and in that regard it is more like a
“real” writing system than many of the alphabets shown at
“conscripts” or “neographies” Web sites like
Omniglot.
Letters in Ewellic do not have to be drawn with any greater precision
than most straight-line letters in the Latin script, such as T or L.

Shouldn’t this letter or that letter be shaped differently, if you
want to be consistent and show the relationships between sounds in the
letterforms?

In creating the original 36 letters and 10 digits in 1980, I tried to
achieve a measure of consistency that was not present in other alphabets
I had seen, particularly the
Runic and
Cirth
alphabets which influenced the visual design of Ewellic. I didn’t
get it right all of the time, but I don’t intend to change the
meaning of any existing letters (which would invalidate existing text
I might have in old notebooks somewhere). The 13 additional letters
(added in 2007) and six hexadecimal digits (added in 2002) were designed
to be consistent with the original model.

Latin-script letters can be written in thousands of different typefaces.
Ewellic letters all consist of straight lines. Doesn’t that
preclude
any stylistic variation?

Actually, the simplicity and lack of ambiguity of letterforms in Ewellic
means that they can be written in a wide variety of styles. Some of the
possibilities for variation include:

Aren’t the Ewellic letters too similar in appearance to each other
to constitute a practical script?

This was
expressed
in 2000 by one of the world’s leading
experts
on writing systems. It is accepted that writing systems that exhibit a
greater amount of variety in their letterforms (within reason) are
easier to learn and to read that those with less variety. (By this
metric, the Greek
alphabet ought to be substantially easier to read than Latin.)

While I concede that Ewellic letterforms are not as easy on the eye as
Latin, I disagree that this makes the alphabet completely
“impractical.” Several real-world scripts, such as
Buhid,
Buginese,
Georgian Khutsuri,
and Rejang,
have been built from similar-looking, mostly straight-line glyphs, and
all have achieved at least some practical use in spite of this
characteristic.

What about the so-called “mandatory” ligatures?

Previous pages about the Ewellic alphabet referred to
“mandatory” ligatures for the combinations AW + Y
(“oy”) and OO + R (“er”). These are the
ligatures I have always used in handwritten Ewellic. Due to the
potential for increased use of fonts like
Code2000 by
James Kass, and the inability of rendering engines and fonts to apply
ligatures to combinations in the Unicode
Private Use Area, it seems more
appropriate to think of these as “suggested” ligatures.
Sic transit.

Since people speak with different accents, is there a
“correct” way to spell words as there is in the standard
orthographies?

Does Ewellic favor or mandate a single “correct” accent or
pronunciation?

Ewellic should be written to reflect each speaker’s impression of
the correct pronunciation of words. It is not an attempt to force
people to speak the same language, dialect, or accent. Different
speakers will pronounce certain words differently—compare American
and British pronunciations of laboratory—and that will
inevitably result in different spellings of those words in the Ewellic
alphabet. This is a characteristic of Ewellic, for better or
worse.

That said, Ewellic letters (especially vowels) are intended to represent
abstract sounds, not precise variations in accents. See the
example below.

I speak English with a British accent. I pronounce words like
“show” with the diphthong əʊ, not a pure Italian-style o.
How should I write this word in Ewellic?

This is still an abstract “o” sound. You should write it
with the plain “long o” vowel in Ewellic. Ewellic is not
meant to capture the exact phonology of speech, the way that
narrowly transcribed IPA does.

I think Ewellic makes too many unnecessary distinctions between sounds
in my language.

This is not a problem, if there are other speakers who do need to make
the distinctions. If your accent or dialect does not distinguish
between sound X and sound Y, choose one letter and use it consistently.

I think Ewellic doesn’t make enough necessary distinctions between
sounds in my language.

This may be a problem, if the distinctions are
phonemic—that is, if they are necessary to prevent confusion or
misunderstanding. In general, I will consider adding new letters only
if the existing letters are insufficient to communicate in one of the
supported languages. Most
writing systems do not capture every possible phonetic nuance (such as
the various “R” sounds) and Ewellic is no different.

If you are convinced that one or more additional letters are necessary
to prevent miscommunication, please contact
me.

This is a known gap in the Ewellic vowel system. This distinction may
sometimes be needed in British English, and some accents of American
English, to avoid misunderstanding. I’m working on a solution.

What are the Ewellic digits?

An alphabet doesn’t necessarily need its own set of
digits—many writing systems worldwide use the European digits
0 through 9—but since one of the original purposes of
Ewellic was for secret writing, a set of digits was sometimes necessary
to avoid divulging telephone numbers, dates, etc. that would give away
the secret. Since I’m publishing Ewellic on the Internet, its
value for secret writing is obviously reduced to near zero, but
I’ve kept the digits around anyway. European digits can be used
instead, if desired.

Hexadecimal (base-16) digits were added in 2002 to fulfill a (real or
imagined) need: no other number system that I’m aware of has
native support for hexadecimal digits. For example, the European digits
0 through 9 have to be supplemented with Latin letters
A through F, and a special notation like
“0x”
or
“16”
must be used to distinguish decimal and hexadecimal values, especially
when the hexadecimal form contains no letters. In Ewellic, a spacing
(non-combining) grave accent ` is written before all
hexadecimal values, eliminating all ambiguity. I don’t plan to
add support for other number bases.

A free
library has been written for GNU/Linux that converts numeric values
to and from Ewellic digits, either decimal or hex, along with about 60
other number systems.

Although there are simple rules that can be used to tell a letter from a
digit, the glyphs used for letters and digits are visually very similar
to each other. This is perhaps one of the most glaring flaws in the
Ewellic glyph model. (On the other hand, readers have also been known
to confuse the
characters 1, I, and l.)

The Private Use Area (PUA) is a block of code space within the
Unicode Standard that is reserved
for characters defined not by Unicode, but by a private agreement
between parties. (“Private” does not necessarily mean
“secret”; the definitions may be published on the Internet
or elsewhere.)

The ConScript Unicode Registry (CSUR) is a private, but fairly
well-known, project for informally assigning space within the PUA
for constructed scripts, like Ewellic. The CSUR project is not
affiliated with the Unicode Standard, the
Unicode
Consortium, or the ISO Working Group
(ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2)
responsible for ISO 10646. A CSUR registration, or proposal, is an
example of a private agreement for using the PUA to encode a given
script.

Ewellic was
registered
in CSUR in February 2008. The proposal was originally written in 2000
and revised several times. About 40 scripts are either registered or
proposed for registration in CSUR.

Are you trying to get Ewellic added into the Unicode Standard itself?

No. To be encoded in Unicode, a script or character must be
demonstrably useful to a much larger group of users than the
small handful of hobbyists and collectors who have expressed interest in
Ewellic. The WG2
“Principles
and Procedures” document recommends “use of the
Private Use Area... if the proposed character has an extremely small or
closed community of customers.” This is what I have done by
proposing the Ewellic alphabet for CSUR. Probably thousands of people
have invented their own alphabet; mine is perhaps just a bit better
documented than most.

For the same reason, I don’t seek an
ISO 15924 script code
element for Ewellic, but instead suggest the private-use code element
Qabe.

Where did you get the name “Ewellic”? It seems awfully
conceited to name an alphabet after yourself.

The alphabet did not have a name until 1998. Since there was no
fictional language or imaginary civilization associated with the
alphabet, it seemed pointless to invent an arbitrary name for it. The
main identifying feature of the alphabet was that it was mine.

The Cyrillic alphabet, named for the Byzantine Greek
St. Cyril
(827-869), served as the model for the name “Ewellic.”
I briefly considered “Ewellian,” but for some reason that
name sounded more like a language than a script.

How do you pronounce “Ewellic”?

The first syllable sounds like the English word you, and the
stress is on the second syllable.

In IPA:
/juˈwelɪk/
In dictionary respelling:
/yo͞o-wĕlʹĭk/
In Ewellic:
́